#natural parenting

What does a homeschool kid do all day?

We spend some time doing one-on-one work on paper and workbooks, but most of the time he’s living life by playing, exploring, and helping us. It turns out these are great ways to learn.

July 14, 2017

Judas Jr. started a week of summer day camp at Hartley Nature Center yesterday. He had a blast and that night we grilled venison and hotdogs and had a fire in the yard with smores. Since we homeschool this was a good way for him to have time with oher kids but without the drawbacks (including massive time sink) of traditional school. Everything is nature-based and interactive with a lot of outside time.

He’s never been away from both of us before and I felt extremely anxious about leaving him with what is essentially a stranger. He’s never even had a babysitter, instead we’ve coordinated work schedules so he always had one of us and I stayed home with him for the first several years. So rather than drop him and go, we busied ourselves on the bike trails for the duration of his class. That way we were on the grounds if he needed us. It was really nice and fun for all of us and we even crossing paths a few times while his group did outdoor activities.

We brought his little balance bike/kickbike along and arrived early so he could ride with us beforehand. I can’t praise this style of bike enough. The whole training wheels method is rediculous because kids just learn how to ride a bike with extra wheels. Once those go off they then have to learn balancing from scratch and it makes no sense. On a kickbike it’s a regular two-wheeled bike but without peddles. Kids use their feet to run and push the bike, they glide with their feet up and put them down instinctively when they need to and end up learning how to ride intutively. The also seem a lot more agile and capable racing around dirt, grass, and mud.

July 25, 2017

Neurodivergent Nidoqueen: The anti-vax movement is based on eugenics.

Even if vaccines did cause autism, it would still be incredibly immoral to put thousands of other people at risk of contracting fatal illnesses. Autistic people are not burdens; we’re people just like everyone else. The idea that we are burdens and must be removed from society is an ableist idea that is rooted in eugenics.

-Glaceon

Equality Golbat: A rewards-only approach can still be abusive.

Reward actions that should be rewarded. Positive reinforcement helps kids remember things that can help them in the future. It’s important to help your kids and get their opinion if they have trouble doing some things. 

Reward your kid for doing something good for someone else without being asked, for instance. Help your kid and reward them for doing something that might not be the easiest thing for them to do. Why reward your kids if you have to help them do something? Because it shows you understand that they’re putting in a lot of effort to do the thing, even with your help.

If you’re rewarding acceptance of punishment, pain, degradation, helplessness, or withholding vital necessities and putting them under the guise of rewards, that is abusive.

-Glaceon

Equality Golbat: If you’d rather pay a doctor to “fix” your child because acceptance is hard work, did you forget it was hard work to get that money in the first place?

One of things you need confront before you ever think about having kids, is that your kids are not going to be you. Those kids might end up radically different from you. Don’t eversay that if your kids aren’t exactly like you, that they’re bad people. 

There are a lot of different people in this world. All we want is to be happy and secure in our lives and in ourselves. There are a lot of different ways to be happy and secure and to do good in the world. Do not be your kid’s bully. Guide them to whatever way helps them be happy and secure and able to do good in the world. 

You might not understand your kid’s definition of happy and secure. But your kid will be infinitely better off if you help them come into their own, rather than force them into being someone they’re not.

-Glaceon

Equality Golbat: The fact that mindfulness has accomplished anything disproves behaviorism.

Mindfulness is essentially meta-thinking: thinking about your own thought process. That’s a very simplified explanation, but it’s the basic foundation. Behaviorism says that your thoughts, feelings, and awareness don’t matter, only trained responses. The fact that anyone has accomplished anything by being mindful disproves that claim.

-Nidoqueen

I’d also like to add that it’s very difficult to actually be mindful of yourself, especially when behaviorism has taught you that your thoughts, feelings, and opinions are worth jack shit. It’s incredibly empowering for abuse victims to practice mindfulness and use it to draw up and sustain their boundaries.

-Glaceon

Equality Golbat: If you believe what and how people think is irrelevant to the human experience, why call yourself a psychologist?

What it comes down to is this: people think differently. People think differently in every social, political, and cultural group that exists. The point of the psychologist shouldn’t be to make our thinking and functioning more monolithic and homogenous. It should help people find ways to work with their current thought processes and functioning in ways that work for them.

-Glaceon

Behaviorism: A school of psychology that focuses on forcibly training specific behaviors.

Behaviorism is based on neurotypical, able-bodied behavior being the norm, and makes no attempts to be inclusive to neurodiverse and disabled people. According to behaviorists, as long as you display “appropriate” behavior, it doesn’t matter whether the process of acquiring such behaviors was harmful or not. This makes it unsettlingly easy for abusive parents to institutionally abuse their children.